Wednesday, March 27, 2013

My boxes of compost are my most cherished art supply. I've talked before about how I build compost out of colored papers of all kinds and that I call it compost because as I dig through the piles of papers and stir up the mix new and exciting color combinations and compositions happen naturally. That's what happened here.The bright orange is the substrate which I painted by smooshing acrylic paint ar﻿ound on the surface. There's a bit of paper napkin, a photograph of maple leaves, a magazine image, and a color copied strip from an old painting. Simple items and a combination of stripes result in a happy piece.Then there's this one.

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ChaosCollage on Paper8 x 8"

﻿It's a similar layout and color combination but to my eyes it isn't as successful as the first one, but who am I to criticize it? I'm always critical of my own work; there's always something that could be improved, especially that strip of orange up the middle.Let's analye it according to the elements and principles of design:

Value: ah, there's my problem with the orange strip. It tipped the scale of value toward equal balance of value. Without the orange strip the dark areas dominate and composition is better. But I just couldn't leave well enough alone.

Repetition: There's plenty of repetition within each color family as well as repetition of line.

Contrast: yep, lots of that.

Dominance, unity, harmony: check.

The list is longer but these will do for today.Do you ever pull out your list of elements and principles and use them to check your work? I find it's helpful when I'm puzzled about why a piece leaves me with a negative feeling.

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.